(with Aimee Kast)

Good evening,

What a glorious month it's been for the Grand Midway Hotel. Halloween always makes for such a brilliant, colorful season in these mountains. I feel like Dracula giving tours to Jonathon Harker in his romantic, far off Transylvania castle. And now the Autumn leaves have begun to change so it's beautiful.

This is just a note of hello and reintroduction to the Grand Midway Hotel's web page. There are two aspects to the hotel web page, the virtual tour and the forum. The virtual tour, which includes views into all the rooms, halls, hiding spots, and basement among other treats, is currently being rebuilt. So that is closed this season. The hotel forum, which you have entered, offers updates of many of the projects being created here. It also exposes haunted stories going on within these darkened, enchanted walls, as well as collected letters from the visiting guests, and archive photos of everyone's adventures as well.

The Grand Midway Hotel is not open for business. It is a private home. It was purchased by singer/songwriter Damien Youth and his wife Betsy Black, and myself, filmmaker Blair Murphy, a few years back as a "breathing canvas." Several artists have resided here since and manifested projects in their own time here. I now remain as the sole owner and host.

If you'd like to peek into our mysterious Shangri La, hopefully it is after midnight, light a candle in a darkened room, and feel free to further explore the writings and photographs of this forum.

I wish you an excellent Halloween.

Thinking of you -from here.

Blair

THE ODD THREAD THAT TOOK ME FROM LOS ANGELES TO WINDBER, PA

1. THE NEED TO STRETCH THE CANVAS WIDER AND DEEPER TO A CANVAS WITHOUT END

I was living in Los Angeles, and had grown unhappy with my experience of the Arts. I had a good decade there living within the bohemian/movie world of Venice, California. I'd met many many movie stars. And for a long time it was exciting and rich and cool. I considered Southern California my home and imagined I would be there for life. But toward the end of the millennium I'd grown extremely restless there. I'd fallen into a bitter disenchantment with the entire movie industry. It wasn't the rich communion among fellow creators I'd envisioned. Instead, it was so soaked with Ego from everyone I knew there and every project was so absent of conviction -save for profit value and furthering of Ego- I just became sickened.

What was I doing any of this for? I was a hard worker, willing to take any risks, and once I'd committed to a project I would devote my life to eventually finishing it no matter what the cost to my personal hours. But I didn't want to engage anything anymore. It was no church to me. The Arts, my beloved mistress, my entire life, had lost all sacrament.

What did I want to do? I wanted to do something massive in the Arts and make an example of myself as well.



For whatever reason I kept thinking of this young man on the other side of the planet, the 17th Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje. He is the present spiritual leader of the Karma Kagya school, who fled Tibet in January 2000 for India and made world news. At the time I didn't know anything about him while I was still in LA, but he kept popping up in my thoughts. It was weird. I had a photo of him on my desk someone had given me. He was just a teenage young man. I'd never read his words, never heard his voice, never read anything about him, nor seen any footage of him.

Then one day I starting considering this odd thought, could someone become a Western version of him, and what did that mean? I pictured someone making an example of themselves in the Arts, but not for Ego or shallow career aspirations, but instead to embody some deeper richer calling and hope to inspire other artists toward this reach as well.

What did that mean? I didn't know. But instantly I heard this young Karmapa in my head answering back, "Do it." Over and over again I'd see this photo of this stranger on my desk, and he'd be saying, "Do it."

It was a strange thought considering I was deep in the world of Hollywood, and associated with vampire horror films, my funeral home upbringing, death and skulls and Egypt and deep inside the current gothic wave creeping across the USA. It was all the secret filming within the Goth world actually that I started to see the Arts again in a light of enchantment, and eventually pushing that envelope, even a form of spirituality.

"The Arts" became a bigger world than all of Los Angeles, which inverted into simply a tool for sending that message out into the world. If we are created in our Creator's image, we are then indeed first and foremost Creators ourselves. And not only that, being created in our Creator's image, we are also holy and without limit.



2. WE AMERICAN KARMAPAS

Fellow filmmaker friend Baird Bryant filmed a movie called Heart of Tibet, where he followed the Dalia Lama around when he came to LA. I worked as an assistant to Baird on that film, and got to meet the Dalia Lama at that time (though I didn't have a clue who the Dalia Lama was when I stood in front of him and he nodded). Baird and I have the same birthday, and our lives have sort of followed very similar cultural routes, in particular rubbing shoulders with the American Beat writers and independent filmmaking in the world of Southern California, only his steps happening earlier as if we were trading a torch to perpetuate some self-summoning tradition.

We even started making jokes when we said our good-byes (thinking we might never see each other again due to Baird's age) that we were Karmapas, a western version of Karmapas anyway if that were possible, and that these good-byes did not matter because we would absolutely see one another again and again as spirit through time and that none of this meant any real ending.

We still see each other, crossing paths only about once a year anymore, but the Karmapa joke reference has created a bond now within our friendship that has seemed to solidify something greater. Like him, I find myself manifesting wacky projects -like this hotel endeavor- which are summoned on a wing and a prayer, and yet somehow manage to reach un-dreamt of heights, taking on spiritual relevance as they begin to blossom. That is how the experience of some of these 'little projects' have translated to me. They started with a conversation or a vision, next follows a commitment, a communion grows, and suddenly this thing exists. I imagine one day I will play the role of wise man elder filmmaker/artist for some younger man that Baird once played for me. All of us should be doing this for one another, cultivating our human garden into the vast miracle that it can absolutely be.

Coincidentally, it was Baird who I called to seek advice when I first learned of the hotel for sale, and wondered if I should do it: purchase it, relocate that far away into the mountains from California, and summon a kind of different church into the Arts within it.

He answered, "Do it."



3. THE HOTEL AS A TIBETAN SAND MANDALA

This hotel, being the breathing canvas that it has been, has been a home and a playground and a sandbox as well as a machine for myself and the fellow artists that have played here, worked here, lived here, shared here, and made examples of themselves here. All along, the entire time we have been engaged in this hotel project, the building has struck me as a kind of massive Tibetan Mandala, but a Western version of a Tibetan sand structure, or as much of one as our all-American modern Western man could parallel. I'm not going to be here forever, nor are the rest of the artists, nor is this building, so we're perfecting it and investing in it as a kind of exercise and a form of ritual, knowing full well that it will eventually be released into the river.

Still, I'm giving it my all here. The caliber of artists who have come through here, as well as the cultural figures who have graced us with their presence, good wishes, and blessing, has been phenomenal.

So, for whatever it is worth, something is happening here in the Arts, a Western version of some summoning, and if nothing else, the chant is telling you to be fearless and to see yourself as a Creator as well, created in your Creator's image, entirely holy and without limit.

Musician Damien Youth and I were searching for a large building to purchase; the location did not matter. Damien's wife, Betsy, called with an amazing discovery. An entire hotel with a bar was for sale on EBay. The price was so low it didn't seem possible. But we decided to go for it. So we bid on the place. We found ourselves relocating almost immediately. It was an unreal leap...into crazy conditions. But we were seeking the breathing canvas, as I called it. We attempted to model the place partly after Warhol's Factory and partly after Hearst's Castle. This vibe resonated with other artists who relocated to move in and join the adventure as well. Damien and Betsy stayed a full single year. It was an incredible, romantic, enchanting, wonderful, massive adventure.

I asked Damien to write up a review of his experience in retrospect. This is what he wrote:


(Damien)

I recall the initial journey to see the Grand Midway Hotel. Seeing all of the snow capped mountains, the old silos and windmills. These were images that were often backdrops in my lyrical visions. Now, here they were! Made manifest by a few hours of driving. My mind reeled at the thought of having my fantasy surroundings, a reality. I knew it would cause me to go deeper as a writer.

The first few months in the old hotel were spent cleaning up the residue that had accumulated over the many years that preceded our arrival. It took a while to, as we sifted through the ghost relics with our mind-set more in line with archeology rather than maintenance. It was as if the old hotel had a mystery to solve, an untold story, that would only be revealed through our patient sifting and our questioning the town's people of any stories they may have heard.

When we were not cleaning, fighting off the freezing cold, planning future events of epic proportion, I would have some down time to write. The Grand Midway Hotel effected my writing, in that it locked me into a retrospective state of mind. All of the things I was familiar with were behind me. So, in trying to unravel the history and the myth of the old hotel, I also carried that perspective into my writing style and began writing courageous, often bridge-burning retrospectives of my own short history, unraveling my own myths.

In retrospect again, writing about the old place, I will say this: All of the good times I had in the hotel seem paramount now to my current tranquil state and all of the bad times now seem comical. It was indeed, as my friend Blair would put it, "An Adventure". And I laugh writing that, because I know there were hard times when we would stop and give each other these looks and we wanted to say, "It was a mistake!" But, the word "mistake" was always replaced with the word "Adventure". And it was truly just that, a great adventure and a still ongoing adventure.

-Damien Youth

Murphy’s Passion Displayed in Hotel
By DAN DiPAOLO
Daily American 30 North Chief
Sunday, March 30, 2008 10:40 PM EDT

WINDBER — As Blair Murphy is showing one of the 32 rooms of the Grand Midway Hotel he sees “pariedolia Bateleur” written on a large mirror in a large room located on the sunlight side of the second floor.

“I don’t know what it means. People tend to try write on things here,” he says with almost a shrug.

But as he walks through the place and trys to explain how he came to this small town by way of Los Angeles, somehow reeling in an assortment of artists and visionaries with him for extended stays, the words begin to haunt.

And then, increasingly, they define him. Pareidolia, simply stated, is a psychological phenomenon where people see meaning in the random. They see the spiritual in a pattern.

Transcendence in the mundane.

Bateleur is French for tight-rope walker. And as he ambles through the hotel and brightly painted, strangely decorated rooms you can see his breath from the cold.

There is art everywhere. Art and ghosts. Ghosts, at least according to the many Internet testimonies, all swearing to a sordid history rife with crimes of passion, prostitution and tragedy.

Passion is all that matters in this story. The history only weighs on this tale as fodder for the artists’ imaginations and perhaps as a contributing factor to the state of disrepair that hotel was in during September of 2001.
That’s when he, Damien Youth and Betsy Black bought the hotel on e-bay for less than the price of some new cars.

At some point there will be mentions of Sean Connery, cadaver dogs and a dead stuffed monkey.

But for now, Murphy sits on a comfortable couch near the main entrance facing the ten-foot high sacred heart painting that even in the semi-darkness blazes, crown of thorns and all.

On his left, still sailing, a 40-foot bar of wood and glass in the shape of a steamer ship. “After the Battle of Midway, they wanted to capitalize,” he says.

“None of us call ourselves Beat,” he says, getting back to the point. What has sprung up here is an artist’s collective of sorts. When he first moved in, they spent months renovating the place.

Rooms were filled with trash and treasure, if treasure can be defined by what inspires art.

Barely livable, and even-now completely unheatable due to the immensity of the place and fiscal realities, it began with dinner.

“There would be a card, and it would say, ‘Tonight is Bigfoot Night,’” he says. Everybody would show up in some sort of costume and it would go from there.

Before long, more and more people would show up. Some would stay for months, fix up a room, move on, and then come again, he says. “Someone looks at a wall and it would become a canvas,” he says. For example, the sacred heart is Windber’s Dylan Fornoff, 25, a current resident.

Sculptures, paintings, poems, pictures, feather boas, mounted animals, every corner a testament to creativity.

It culminates in the annual Kerouac Fest, which might or might not happen this year, he says. When it’s on, fellow artists and friends come from as far away as Louisiana for a weekend of hard-core conversation and collaboration.

They also come to get their picture taken with a dead monkey that sits by itself in a small room. The monkey was a prop in a Sean Connery movie, he says.

It is in that creepy room where cadaver dogs found small pieces of charred bone behind the wall, he says.

He is comfortable with the creepy, having grown up in Haddonfield, N.J., the son of funeral home directors.

The 42-year-old says that one of his first grade descriptions of his home life was ‘my dad paints people’s lips.’ Even now the occasional coffin sits in a corner and plastic skeletons float above the bar in the hotel.

With that indelible imagery implanted in his youth it might have been just about marking time until he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Cinema from the University of Bridgeport, Conn.

Los Angeles meant working in film for more than a decade. He was a cameraman for Prince, assistant to Stan Lee and rubbed shoulders with giants. It was not fulfilling.

“I wanted to do something different,” he says.

A breathing canvas, a haven for conversations about the Bhagavad Gita and the book of Genesis.

“Look at Kerouac, he created a mythology using all of his friends. That’s very endearing to me,” he says. And because of the hotel, and the haven of Windber where a person can walk outside at night without care, it’s a reality.

A sculpture of a woman by Central City’s George Turner stands on an antique safe.

Among the fans and friends of the experiment are beat-era musician David Amram and John Allen Cassady, the son of Kerouac friend and inspiration Neal Cassady, he says.

Others like cinematographer Baird Bryant have also participated in the weekends and stayed at the hotel. Chris Yambar, of “The Simpsons” fame has created logos for the festival.

“We’re created in our creator’s image and so we’re creators as well. That’s very empowering to me.”

Pariedolia Bateleur.

“I’m a blind faith person. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing,” he says, breath steaming in the cold, surrounded by ghosts and art.

There is no sign outside the Grand Midway Hotel, that was removed years ago. If you can even find us, as we are so far removed and distant, there are two iron deer heads from China on the front doors. From the outside you might even think the building is abandoned. It isn't.

Inside, the place is spiralling with spirit.


(1800s artist colony that was here)

In the mid-1800's, before this was a coal mining community, this was an artist colony in these woods. It doesn't feel like any accident that we are a part of that lineage.

Before that, long, long ago, the central Windber basin land beneath this hotel was a location of Native American Indian high ritual magic. That is the surmised real reason for the intense energy of this place. That also doesn't feel like any coincidence.

We proudly perpetuate the continuation of this combination of the Arts and the indigenous American spirituality which rockets through here. Make no mistake, we are consciously embodying that thunder.

I've placed a small plaque on the door with the quote from the Lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt, 280 BC. Enjoy the tour!